|
Personal experience to add to the great advice form Starson17
I went through the same thing and after multiple tries at adding a few at a time I just gave up and imported everything with the merge duplicates option turned on.
I did it on my spare laptop and it took several days 24/7 but it was the only way to go.
This gave me about 30,000 entries from which I manually checked for duplicates. After about 2-3 months I had 7,000+ entries.
Things that helped me that I wish I had found out sooner
Convert all books to one format so is easier to compare different files same title (do this before adding covers if using calibres reader as it seems to take forever to load) I use different reader that will only load one instance and is faster, cover or not. Two instances are good if you remember to close them all before editing or converting and I don't leaving me with redundant directories.
Do bulk download of metadata/covers (if not existing) with overwrite author title turned off.
Create two custom fields one for whether book needs fixing and one for quality/errors that should be fixed. This lets you know you have viewed and evaluated the book.
Maybe one custom field would be sufficient but I often sort on one or the other.
Calibre has improved greatly since I started with version 6.4x especially in the metada gathering.
It is well worth the initial effort.
Helen
|